The ink was hardly dry on the Supreme Court ruling warning New York’s Governor Cuomo that he could not continue to discriminate against Catholic Churches and Orthodox Jews, before the media started spinning and social media lefties started howling that conservative justices wanted everyone to die of the virus.

Establishment papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post played a major role in spreading this disinformation.

Take this New York Times subheader, “The court signaled that if unconstrained religious observance and public safety are sometimes at odds, then religious freedom should win out.”

The actual decision states that…

1. There’s no actual evidence that unfavorable treatment of religious institutions is in the interests of public safety

2. The religious institutions in question are following public safety guidelines

The issue that the decision dealt with is that the artificial classifications used by Cuomo discriminated against religious institutions and communities, treating some secular establishments as essential, imposing limits on houses of worship with thousands of seats at the same level as much smaller facilities. It also dealt with the larger constitutional questions of Freedom of Religion, but the core legal issue was the stuff above. 

So the New York Times subheader, whose essential premise has been widely picked up, is doubly false. The decision does not say that public safety should be put at risk or that observance should be unconstrained, but that it should not be discriminated against.

The New York Times is engaging in a disinformation campaign to slur the decision. But no disputed tags will be slapped on it.